At some point this week, I installed new drivers for my 8800GT, which was all fine until my computer crashed about an hour later playing L4D2. Since then, it would crash 10 minutes into a game, prompting experimentation with drivers and such for quite some time. Today, I decided to check if the video card had died, so I installed my old 8400GS. Turns out everything works fine with it in there.

One problem.

Most of my newer games hardly play properly now. I can manage about 20fps in L4D2 at 800x600 with medium settings, when I used to get 60+fps at 1680x1050 with high settings with AA :P

So yeah, a pretty big difference. I'm looking at replacing it with a HD4850, which would be a bit better at a low-ish cost. Not much else to say on this except I can't play L4D2 or Modern Warfare 2 on decent framerates now :(

In gaming related news, I've been getting through Assassin's Creed II, and it is a really enjoyable game. I've found that when thieves follow you, they sort of fall in the water a lot if you're on rooftops, but aside from stupid AI at times, it's really quite good.